Lifetime Guarantee

Gillham

CHAPTER 1

Why You Struggle

The following suicide note came to me in January 1986:

I can’t stand living anymore. For an eternity, it seems, I have done little but exist. I am of no use to anyone, especially God. There is so much in my head that I know He wants me to do for myself, but I just seem incapable of willing myself to do anything—especially about my mental state. Suicide seems to be the only solution left.

I’m sure people will not understand. They will think that it was senseless to waste such a young life. That is exactly how I feel: It is senseless. But, since I am wasting my life anyway, I might as well do something! I will do the only thing I believe I can do—stop existing.

There is no way to explain this to people. No one can understand the torment a person goes through day after day unless they themselves have been mentally ill. No matter how much people say they love me and no matter how much they encourage me to pull myself out of this, it still doesn’t help. I simply don’t know how to help myself. I’ve tried other people’s suggestions—including committing myself to a psych ward—and nothing helps. Over and over again the message is the same: You have to help yourself. But no one can tell me how to help myself.

Do you see why suicide is my only alternative? What would you do? Where would you go if you didn’t know how to help yourself? What would you do to stop feeling so helpless, to stop feeling like such a failure for not being the Christian you know Christ wants you to be? What would you do?

What would you do if year after miserable year you only seemed to take up space—space no one seemed to care about or notice anyway. I could commit suicide and literally not be discovered for weeks, maybe even months!

Christ said that I am to be the salt of the earth. I can hardly stand to do the bare minimum each day to exist, let alone care for anyone else. There was a time in my life when this was so different. A time when I exhausted myself with labor for others. But as time went by, I began to see that Christ wasn’t enough in my life. I needed and wanted something more. I tried to keep working toward the goal of helping others, but I just got more and more drained until now I am mentally ill.

Christ said that I was to be the light of the world. My light has been reduced to a flicker. In fact, it is worse than flickering; it is now smoking from having just been blown out.

What a waste. Is there any hope? Christians would say, Yes. They would point to a relationship with Christ, and I would agree if I could only see it again. If I could only feel it again.

What would you say to this young woman? Would you say she needs professional help? Some years ago that’s what I would have said—before I began to comprehend the truths set forth in this book.

Exactly one year later, I met this dear lady at a seminar my wife Anabel and I were leading in Washington, D.C. The woman is now a happy, productive, relaxed Christian who praises Christ daily. In the postscript of a more recent letter from her, she said, Just today I brought a woman into my home the doctors feel should enter the psych ward. Who would have thought a year ago when I was planning my death that God would be using me to help someone who is so desperate? And she signed off with a smiley face.

The Flesh

The truths contained in this book are precious, fine gold. I can say that without feeling I’m bragging because they aren’t mine. I have merely been entrusted with them to pass them on to others. For you to understand them, we must proceed step by step, the first of which is to give you an extensive understanding of what the Bible means when it speaks of flesh or walking after the flesh (e.g., Romans 8:4). The suicidal woman’s lack of understanding of this concept almost destroyed her.

In these first two chapters, then, I’ll show how you have programmed your brain with earthly techniques for satisfying your needs for love and self-esteem—again, the greatest needs in life—or for believing yourself to be unworthy of either and thus living your life to keep love away because it makes you uncomfortable. Both of these techniques are do-it-yourself projects that God calls flesh. I’ll document this later from Philippians 3:3-9.

The term flesh has many meanings in the Bible, but our primary definition here is this: Flesh refers to the old ways or patterns by which you have attempted to get all your needs supplied instead of seeking Christ first and trusting Him to meet your needs. These patterns develop as you are growing up in your parents’ home. And when the Holy Spirit begins the work of tearing them down, most Christians panic at the idea of losing them.

We can lump all Christians into three broad flesh categories: Yukky Flesh, Plain Vanilla Flesh, and USDA Choice Flesh. The person with the Yukky Flesh has been reared in an environment where, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get his love supply out of it by his do-it-yourself tactics. The suicidal woman at the beginning of this chapter has Yukky Flesh. She was nearly deceived into suicide to escape her feelings of low self-esteem. The Plain Vanilla, or average, Flesh person has been moderately successful, neither a roaring success nor a total failure at getting his need for self-esteem met. The USDA Choice Flesh person is everyone’s candidate for Mr. Christian. His high self-esteem is a result of his skill at milking love out of the world.

We’re going to look at how all three flesh types get programmed into Christians. For economy’s sake, however, I’ll only describe in greater detail the structuring of Yukky Flesh. You can then apply how that happens to the development of the other two.

How Does God Spell Relief? (Step 1)

The Word teaches that God is love and that He loves us (see 1 John 4:9,10). God created humanity with a burning need for love. That’s why you’re sitting there needing love. If you didn’t need love, you wouldn’t need God. In fact, that’s why you were created with needs, period. God is the supreme authority figure who has the market cornered on being able to supply all our needs. Thus, He created a bunch of people who have a ton of needs. This way, some of us would recognize our need and turn to Him through Jesus to get our needs supplied His way. God spells relief J-e-s-u-s. Fleshly people spell it s-e-l-f (I’ll do it my way).

The Problem: Lord of the Ring (Step 2)

When you showed up on planet earth in a little earthsuit two feet long, you drew a circle around yourself and declared, I am Lord of this Ring! Oh, you were willing to let God run the universe, but your attitude was, "I am god of all the turf inside this circle. I will control this area. Playing Lord of the Ring is what original sin is all about. Adam saw to it that you’d be a born" loser, and you immediately began to demonstrate it. You knew nothing about God and His provision for supplying all your needs, so you took over His role. Since most of your other needs were being met pretty well, you looked to mom, dad, siblings, relatives, and later to peers to satisfy your need for love. That cut God out of His own picture.

How Little Children Learn About Themselves (Step 3)

A preschool child is the most self-centered creature God ever made; he thinks only of himself and his needs. This being true, he learns only of himself as he interacts with others. When the dad of a nine-month-old baby points to his own nose and then to that of his teensy offspring and says, Nose, the little one doesn’t reason, How interesting! Dad and I both have noses! Oh, no. He thinks, I’ve got a nose and it looks like that. Totally self-centered thinking.

Who Am I?

Let’s consider what a little child learns who is born to a couple who had to get married due to his unexpected arrival. Let’s name him Charlie. His mom and dad were only sixteen when they were forced into marriage by both sets of parents. Charlie’s imminent arrival caused the newlyweds to drop out of high school in their junior year, which ruined their lives.

The little daddy had his heart set on being a college athlete and someday a football coach, but Charlie shattered that dream. It’s now three years later, and dad works at the local Dairy Queen for seventy-five dollars a week. The onset of football season is always agony for him as he meditates on lost opportunities and a hopeless future. He broods a lot over the life sentence he’s serving with no hope of time off for good behavior. Color him hostile.

The little mom had always wanted to be a sorority girl at her mom’s alma mater. Mom and her mother before her were both members. In fact, they both still wear their pins at homecoming. This was a big thing for her in her childhood, but now, at nineteen, she works at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.

Her friends come home from the university on weekends in their fancy new clothes, but she still has to wear her old high school wardrobe, which is now outdated. She listens to their exciting stories of campus life, and she sees their manicured nails, expensive hairdos, polished toenails, and so on—all the result of their being able to invest hours per week on their earthsuits. She is bitter and resentful. She, too, sees herself serving a life sentence for having made one fatal mistake. And to make matters worse, it was his idea.

The romantic side of marriage for her has long since dissipated. Sex is more of an obligation than a romantic oasis—Just one more thing I have to do for that louse who ruined my life! It’s sort of like cooking another batch of chicken, only after closing hours! Color her despairing.

There are basically two sorts of folks on the earth: ulcer-givers and ulcer-getters. These two are ulcer-givers; they give them to other folks, mainly to each other. They keep a hot war going on constantly in their little three-room house. Right at the height of the battle (words, not fists), dad will unleash a verbal artillery salvo on Charlie: "It’s all your fault, you little bleepity bleep! If you hadn’t come along, I wouldn’t be married to this old bat! I wish you’d never been born!" And he storms out of the house in a rage, to the accompanying tune of his wife’s screaming that she hopes he’ll get lost and never be found.

The Results

Now, moment by moment, day by day, who is Charlie learning about? Is he learning, Now, wait a minute, dad! I didn’t ask to be born into this chicken outfit? No, he’s learning about himself, remember? He’s processing the situation like this: It’s all my fault that mom and dad are so miserable and unhappy! If I were gone, it’d be better for everybody! I am the problem! I really do need love, but I don’t blame mom and dad for not loving me. If I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t love me either! Sorry, no-good bum! Anybody that would cause the very ones he loves the most to be miserable ought to be shot! I hate myself! Obviously, he doesn’t verbalize it as I have done, but it’s all coming through to him at the gut level.

Charlie’s family environment represents the whole world to him because it’s the only world he knows. Therefore, he generalizes his attitude to this: The whole world would be better off if I had never been born.

The Plot Thickens (Step 4)

You have a mind and you have emotions, a thinker and a feeler. Your feeler responds to your thinker; whatever you set your thinker on, your feeler will react to it. For example, suppose there’s a rattlesnake on the floor coiled to strike you on the leg, and you see it poised. First, you will detect this stimulus with your mind, which responds, I believe I’m in great danger! Let’s quantify this on a 1 to 10 scale, where 10 is the greatest. I believe I’m in great danger, and that’s a 10! Now, feeler responds to mind’s belief like this: I feel terrified, and that’s a 10!

Then suppose that on closer examination you detect that the snake is made of rubber. Mind says, Why, there’s no danger here; I believe I’m safe. And mind immediately goes back down to level 1. But what about feeler? Does it go immediately back to 1? No way! Oh, it’ll eventually go down all right, but it’ll take thirty minutes to do so. It’ll go down like a BB sinking in oil.

Now let’s say that your mind’s gone down to 1, and in ten minutes your feeler is down to about a 7. Then you open a drawer that’s got a spider in it, and the spider scoots up your sleeve! Your mind goes from 1 to 10 instantly, and feeler covers the three points back to the top in one leap.

Generalizing from this illustration, let me pose a question. What if you are reared in a home where your dad is a rattlesnake and your mom is a spider? Or maybe it’s your brother or an aunt or a surrogate, like grandma. They keep your mind and your feeler at level 10 most of the time. When they back off for a few minutes, your mind will go down to 1 and think, Whew, relief at last! But feeler only gets down to about a 7 when one of them does it to you again. Wham! Bam! Ten and 10! Due to this process, do you see that by the time you are five years old, it’s been so long since your feeler’s been below a 7 that it sort of bottoms out on 7? Seven becomes the door, or threshold, below which your feeler does not go. This is what happens to a child like Charlie.

Psychologists teach that by the time a child reaches age five, 85 percent of his personality is established and is irreversible. Unfortunately, those psychologists never heard of 2 Corinthians 5:17, which says that any person in Christ is a new creation, that old things have passed away, and that all things are new. What psychologists are observing is that kids’ feelers get programmed, and this controls the person throughout his entire life. But praise God, we walk by faith, not by feel. There is a way out.

Does Your Elevator Go Clear Down to the Lobby?

Now suppose Charlie grows up and gets saved by accepting Christ as his personal Lord and Savior. God may do many glorious works to erase some of his hang-ups, but He doesn’t erase them all, and I find that in the vast majority of cases the adult who has had childhood experiences such as I have described has his feeler stuck on about a 7 or even a 9.5. It’s been so long since the points below 7 on his emotional Richter scale have been exercised that they’ve atrophied away like arm muscles in a cast. After many years, they aren’t even operative any longer. They’re like a 1935 Buick that’s been sitting in a little old lady’s garage since World War II. It has all the standard equipment, but it sure won’t run! Its parts are stuck. It needs to be freed up. And the Holy Spirit is the oil who can deal with the problem I’m describing.

The Beat Goes On (Step 5)

God has designed the human brain with memory banks. They’re just like the First National Bank, only instead of being a depository for money, they are depositories for memories. Your memory banks have memory traces burned across them. These are habit patterns of how you act, how you feel, and how you think. The more you repeat these patterns, the more deeply entrenched they become. This is the usual method for their development, although a memory trace may become deeply imprinted in just one (often traumatic) episode.

Some of these memory traces are fine, such as your particular language pattern. These patterns were etched into your memory banks through your experiences, and your speech is now controlled by this. And the Lord doesn’t get concerned about whether you sound as if you were reared in California or New York.

Memory traces are like highways, and the more you drive on them, the wider they become. Traffic flow is the key to development and maintenance. The more you spend your time in the pattern, the stronger it becomes. I suppose you’re sitting there with several thousand memory traces ranging from eight-laners to cow trails. Some of them are okay, but some of them are sheer garbage in God’s ecology. Let’s color these green for garbage. These green highways were generated by the old man as he sought to get his needs supplied on planet earth using his resources and cutting God out of the picture. He (the old man) was his own god. He declared himself Lord of the Ring.

…And On (Step 6)

With that understanding, we can see that little Charlie, having been reared with rejection, learned that he was yukky. He was trained like a bird dog to accept as truth that he really is yukky. And now his feeler is stuck on a threshold of 8, having not been below an 8 in years. Digits 1 through 7 are nonexistent. They have atrophied away. As he becomes more and more aware of who he is (yukky), his feeler will become more and more programmed. This has become a monstrous, green highway for him. He feels yukky most of the time.

The New Math

As Charlie matures, he becomes more astute in his observations of the world, better able to objectively assess truth. The only trouble is that since his feeler is stuck on 8 and always has been so far as he’s able to recall, he now has renumbered his emotional Richter scale. Since 8 is as low as he’s ever experienced, he now calls 8 a 1.

Do you see, then, that Charlie can go from his 1 up to 10 five times faster than someone who’s playing with a full deck? He’s got only two points on his Richter scale. But he doesn’t know that. He just knows that he reacts internally (or externally) five times as rapidly as other kids do, and then he objectively concludes that he’s weird. I use quotation marks around the word objectively because Charlie will assure you that he knows he’s weird. He believes he has arrived at this conclusion objectively when, in fact, he has arrived at it by virtue of how he feels. This is his normal experience. He typically hates himself and wishes he were someone different, someone he could love.

The Noose Tightens (Step 7)

If you identify with this category I’ve been discussing, I’m not making light of you. I know it may be painful to have me dredging up all this trauma from your past, but trust me that the Lord has shown me some solid answers.

Now let’s grow Charlie up to adulthood. His feeler has been stuck for so long that its programming is as deep as the Grand Canyon. He has built his life around rejection. He rejects himself and others, being unable to trust them. He believes that if he gets too close to them, they will hurt him or discover how yukky he really is and turn away from him. Thus, he has learned that it’s safer to just keep everyone away. If anyone earnestly tries to show love to him, even his wife or kids, he will be skeptical of it. Since he hates himself, anyone who tries to love him must be either pretty dumb or else a phony.

What does Charlie do then? He runs tests on the love others offer to see if it will break down. When it does (and it usually will due to techniques he has learned to employ), something inside him seems to fall into place. I knew it! I knew it! he thinks. I knew she didn’t love me! I just had this feeling. She fooled me for fourteen years, but her true colors finally showed! Or if the lover’s love does not break down, Charlie may actually drive the lover away, being unable to tolerate the love. He wants it, but he can’t handle it. He’s like a dog chasing a car and finally catching it: What do I do with this? He has never experienced a love environment before and he can’t handle it.

At the other extreme, if Charlie ever tastes love, he may latch onto it like white on rice. I’ve seen more than one Yukky Flesh mother who smothers her kids, often producing lots of them because I love kids. She then strives to keep them dependent on her so she can extract her love supply out of them, while simultaneously alienating them with her counterproductive methods. Thus she winds up rejected again and proves that she really is yukky.

If you try to be kind to such a person at Sunday school, she shows up on your front porch after lunch just to visit with such a nice person. She leaves at 10:30 p.m., but not before learning how many days you have free this week so she can come over and enjoy good Christian fellowship. Now she’s sucking her love supply out of you. It will begin to drive you up the wall. Then Satan will work the false guilt number on you as you begin to resent her taking up so much of your time.

I’ve also seen some folks with the rejection patterning who are all peaches and cream one day and who will give you the cold shoulder for no reason the next. They are the vacillators; they jump from one of these polarities to the other without predictability. Once you see what’s happening to these dear people, it will become easier for you to discern the cause of these symptoms.

The Finishing Touch (Step 8)

Let’s return to Charlie’s childhood and use the